A Decade of Haiku

Ten years ago today, the first post appeared on the mailing list of our project - then still called "OpenBeOS" - officially marking the start of our endeavor. Back then, with the imminent demise of Be Inc., there was an excitement and creative motivation in the air, that lead many to think a first release was only a matter of a few years. As it turns out, this estimation was a bit too optimistic...

Others didn't have confidence in the project and attested a quick dissolving before having anything to show. They were apparently wrong too. After ten years Haiku is still here and making progress. And with a quite stable and feature rich Alpha 3 we have a pretty good picture of what R1 will look like.

In those 10 years many developers came and went, and some are still around, coding away with a passion. With further progress more and more non-coders became active and did their part to improve the system. This continued passion and determination in realizing a shared vision makes me confident that we'll see Haiku around in another ten years time. I wonder what soon-to-be-released version of Haiku we'll be excited about then...

Comments

Wow, is that so old ? :)
Back then i didn't take seriously the OpenBeOS project, i thought 'Blueeyedos' would be the first 'descendant' but i were wrong.
Back then Be,inc turned into the internet appliance market and now everyone is struggling to put his tablet on the market...
The Be's spirit is alive, i am sure you guys will see further, i believe in Haiku definitely more than 10 years ago :)

As an avid BeOS user back in the days, I've been following this project closely the past five years. I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed by the slow progress though, and the lack of stability (the last time I tried it, my new nVidia card didn't work, SMP had to be disabled, and none of the WiFi cards worked - plus it wasn't very stable or fast.)

At the sad thing is - once done, we're left with a highly dated OS that's too little too late.

In my opinion, the project should just scrap the kernel work (it takes forever) and build a BeOS layer on top of Linux.

Nobody cares if it's Linux/BeOS as long as we have the wonderful C++ kit api's and the snappy GUI (hopefully updated to meet modern standards.)

That solves the stability problems in the kernel, and the much more important lack-of-drivers problem.

So let me get that straight... After ten years of blood, sweat and tears we're in a state where a feature complete R1/beta1 is in sight. And now we should rip out a major part of our central app_server and maybe also scrap the kernel for Linux and start afresh? All with the through the recent survey confirmed handfull of developers (whose time becomes ever more limited as many start families or get more feeble with old age (hi Oliver :)).

You are missing the point of Haiku, the devs are not making it in order to please 'joe average', they are making the system they THEMSELVES wants to use, and what they want to use is a remake/enhancement of Beos. If other people wants to use it aswell then thats great, but it's certainly not what drives the devs to spend pretty much all their spare-time working on Haiku.

And 'joe average' will never use Haiku anyway, nor will he use Linux, he uses Windows.

It may look compelling and reasonable to port the Haiku userland to the Linux kernel. But that is from a perspective which is ignorant of the technical details involved. It would be compelling perhaps, if the Linux kernel could be used as is. But in reality, it would need modifications that would never be accepted upstream. Once we are actually talking about a Linux fork, with all the maintainance burden and quickly going out of sync with the mainline kernel, it becomes much less compelling. Just look at Android - they've had to do relatively little changes to the kernel, I assume, and now they are stuck with an old version. With Haiku, the changes would likely have to be bigger, since the underlaying system isn't hidden as much as in Android. Just think about the file system layout, and that is the least of anyone's worries, should this effort be attempted.

Someone else already pointed out that world dominance is not what the project is aiming for. We don't care much about "everyone" using Haiku. It is fun as long as enough people use it to keep it alive and progressing. Granted, I wish progress would be faster. But why would there be more developers if Haiku was based on Linux? It's just Linux then. If you want a nice C++ API, you can use Qt on Linux. It is much more complete than the Haiku API anyway. No, there are other things of value in Haiku, but of course its much harder to see them if your hardware isn't well supported.

I kinda like the "Classic" looks, especially with vector icons and gradient widgets. I hope is stay as "Classic" preset in the future, when there'll be all sorts of "more modern" OpenGL-accelerated bells and whistles.

Thanks for your interest, but you are apparently not using Haiku right, anyway. There is no place where you would need to dive into 10 levels deep menus - and while you sure can navigate your whole file system in a sub menu (which is the only place that comes to mind there, but it's a great feature if you ask me), it's completely optional, you can use Tracker like any other file manager if you want to.

a gui should be intuitive and no user should need special training so that he can avoid using it wrong. A user interface should be made for users and not developers, the users should have the priority. Ignoring all the users just because you personally like it another way is really not nice. When it comes to user interface the opinion of the users should have more weight, and telling them that they just don't know what is good for them (and instead they should learn using the current gui better) is really the wrong way.

What are you going on about? The original post made an invalid criticism and Axel pointed it out. Nobody has to go through 10 levels of menus to get to stuff, that's ridiculous.

'a gui should be intuitive and no user should need special training"

Actually this isn't true. All guis have to be learned. The first time someone uses Windows, Mac, or anything, they have to spend some time learning the system and the conventions: how to navigate around, what are the keystrokes, what app does what, etc, etc. Same is true for BeOS/Haiku. Usually when someone complains that something isn't intuitive, what they mean is that they've learned to do things a certain way on another system (e.g. Linux users) and then come to Haiku and expect it all to work the same. It doesn't, and so you have to spend a few days learning the conventions and usages for Haiku. It's not hard.

Haiku's interface is very simple and user-friendly. It's not geared toward developers. Don't know where you get that notion. It *IS* different in a few aspects from other systems. A few hours looking over some docs (e.g. the User Guide) and playing around the system and new folks are generally good to go.